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Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, one of the go-to media experts on Watergate because he and Bob Woodward were the famous Washington Post reporters who broke the story that led to President Nixon’s resignation, forged quite a different reputation in the era of President Trump.
Bernstein offered his reaction to news of the leaked recording of a heated telephone conversation between Trump and Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Sunday on the state’s election results which have been certified for president elected Biden.
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“It wasn’t déjà vu, it was something much worse than what happened at Watergate,” Bernstein told CNN. “We have both a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States at the same time with this one person, overthrowing the very basis of our democracy and desirous of acting criminally in this subversion.”
While such comments from Berstein might sound quite frightening from the reporter whose reporting torpedoed Nixon’s presidency, the comments might also sound as familiar as the now-CNN political analyst repeatedly invoked Watergate during the Trump presidency. .
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In September, as Bob Woodward released his audio tapes of Trump speaking candidly about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in the early months of the pandemic, Bernstein called them “the smoking gun of his negligence.”
“It’s a dereliction of duty, recorded as no other presidential dereliction of duty has been, even more so than the Nixon tapes in this case,” Bernstein said. “The last time this happened during the end of Nixon’s presidency, the Republican leadership … went to the White House and told Nixon he had to step down. And the facts here are even more serious. than at Watergate. “
During CNN’s coverage of the Ukraine scandal, Berstein claimed there were “echoes” from Watergate and later said it was “perhaps worse in some ways.”
In 2018, in the midst of the Russia inquiry led by Special Advocate Robert Mueller, Bernstein deemed the entire Trump presidency “worse than Watergate.”
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“What we’re seeing under Trump’s presidency is worse than Watergate. It’s worse than Watergate, as I said, because the system was working at Watergate,” Bernstein explained. “The heroes of Watergate were Republicans who demanded that the president be held accountable, who demanded that he be transparent, who demanded to know what the president knew and when did he know it, and who conducted a bipartisan investigation that led, to understand and find out what Nixon had done, while Republicans on Capitol Hill have so far done almost everything they can to hinder and undermine the legitimate investigation. So it’s a totally different and much more dangerous situation. “
Bernstein also invoked Watergate while hitting Trump’s chumminess with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2018 joint press conference in Helsinki, called the sacking of FBI Director James Comey ‘potentially more dangerous’ than Watergate , and he even made comparisons with Nixon before Trump took office, claiming in December 2016 that “Richard Nixon was nothing, in terms of a lie, compared to what we saw from Donald Trump.”
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However, in the 2016 election, Bernstein sang a different tune, only to verify Trump’s claim that the Hillary Clinton email scandal was “bigger than Watergate”, claiming that “none average “was the exact comparison.
“Watergate was talking about a criminal president of the United States who presided over a criminal administration from the day he took office until the day he left,” Bernstein said at a roundtable in October 2016, noting later that the Clinton’s conduct was always “reckless.”
In the wake of Trump’s phone call leaked, social media critics pointed to Bernstein’s repetitive claims.
“Is there something NOT worse than Watergate for this guy?” commentary writer Drew Holden asked, estimating more than a dozen Watergate comparisons in a long Twitter thread.
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“Lol, you can’t make that up,” responded federalist contributor Benjamin Weingarten.
“Carl Bernstein literally calls everything worse than Watergate,” wrote GOP strategist Chris Barron.
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